As professionals, teachers are at the forefront of innovation in the language arts. Classrooms provide the space for new ideas, new instructional techniques, and new tools—but they’re not the only place for innovation. Sometimes innovations come from home experiences, afterschool programs, libraries, and communities. We invite manuscripts that describe exciting innovative practices that are enriching the lives of young people. Who is leading the way? What should we, as fellow educators, researchers, and family members, know about what’s going on? What conditions have led to innovative spaces and practices? In what ways are the innovations inviting children to participate in the language arts? How can we follow the lead of the most innovative practitioners? (Submission deadline: July 15, 2012)

January 2014: Inquiries and InsightsIn these unthemed issues, we feature your current questions and transformations as educators, community members, students, and researchers. Many directions are possible in this issue. What tensions do you see in literacy education today? What do readers of Language Arts need to notice and think about? What inquiry work have you done that can stretch the field of literacy and language arts? Describe your process of learning about literature, literacy, culture, social justice, and language. What new literacy practices do you see in communities, after-school programs, and classrooms? What supports these practices? What is getting in the way of change? What connections are adults and children making as they engage in the art of language? Join us in creating a collection of inquiries and insights. (Submission deadline: September 15, 2012)

March 2014: Common Core or Rotten Core?As the English Language Arts Common Core Standards are being implemented in US schools, what is working? What’s not? What are your views of the Common Core? Are they helpful? Hurtful? Will these new national standards transform schools? Or are they fatally flawed? This issue will present research about classroom ELA instruction and policy as well as commentary from teachers and researchers about the Common Core Standards. For this call, we invite submissions that are commentaries of 350 words or fewer in addition to our more traditional submissions (research studies, literature reviews, and theoretical pieces of 6500 words or fewer). (Submission deadline: November 15, 2012)

May 2014: Language and Literacy Brokering

This special issue is guest-edited by Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Danny Martinez, and Ramon Martinez. They characterize the issue this way: Considerable evidence exists that children bring tremendous linguistic resources to school from their experiences in homes and communities. Too often, however, these resources are not recognized or built upon in the classroom. This is especially true for multilingual and multidialectal children of color, students designated as English Learners, speakers of “nonstandard” varieties of English, and immigrant youth who serve as language and literacy brokers for their families. We invite articles that examine how the language, literacy, and cultural competencies that youth develop in their everyday lives can be leveraged for learning within school settings. How are language arts teachers building on student strengths? In what ways can school contexts help facilitate this? How do students’ everyday linguistic competencies overlap with the forms of language and literacy that are privileged in schools? How are teachers and students learning from each other in ways that increase classroom learning opportunities? We are especially interested in work that explores ways of building on the particular skills and capacities of students from non-dominant groups. (Submission deadline: January 15, 2013)